The Denver Broncos and Fox31 on Friday will announce a new partnership for the John Fox coach’s show beginning Sept. 5. “Fox on Fox” will be the promotion-friendly handle.

“We had discussions around it,” said KMGH General Manager Byron Grandy, whose station has had “The John Fox Show” since 2012. “Ultimately, after discussions with the Broncos, I think they found another home for it.”

Fox31 is expected to air the half-hour at 9:30 p.m. Fridays, with a repeat at 9:30 a.m. Sundays leading into the game during football season. (Previously, KMGH had scheduled the show for Saturday evenings.) On KDVR, Fox31 sports director Nick Griffith will host.

Denver’s KUSA won both Station Excellence and News Excellence honors. KUSA also picked up awards for topical documentary, “After Aurora” by Chris Vanderveen and Journalistic Enterprise for “Lila’s Daddy” by Vanderveen.

KDVR was honored for its Evening Newscast, KMGH picked up honors for its morning newscast.

Five broadcasters were inducted into the Heartland Chapter’s Silver Circle, for 25 years of outstanding contribution to the television industry. This year’s inductees: John Goheen, for years with KMGH as a videojournalist; Anne Trujillo, KMGH anchor; Greg Moody, formerly Critic-at-Large for KCNC; Mike LeClaire, photographer at KMGH, and Ken Miller, executive producer with ROOT Sports Rocky Mountain.

Longtime 7News sports anchor Lionel Bienvenu will take on a new role as host of “The Now,” a 4 p.m. soft news hour in the works from the E.W. Scripps Company, owner of KMGH, in tandem with the local station. The soft launch is Monday; “Dr. Oz” moves to 3 p.m. in place of the cancelled Katie Couric hour.

The station has been in rehearsals as part of the wider project, with local content supplemented by a national news desk, based in Denver, providing inserts to Scripps stations.

Consider the addition part of the move toward what used to be called “news you can use,” or as they say in the biz now, “utilitarian content.” The fact that most of it is homemade, or within the corporate family, makes it much cheaper than a syndicated show like “Oz” or “Katie.”

Bienvenu, at 7News since 2001, would seem to be a versatile enough player for the new gig. He’s handled hosting duties before, notably on “Monday Night Live” with Broncos receiver Ed McCaffrey.

Eric Kahnert, a former 9News weekend anchor most recently a primary anchor at KSTP in Minneapolis, has been named to succeed the retiring Mike Landess as 7News anchor. Kahnert joins KMGH on June 30; Landess is set to retire in late August.

Kahnert, who worked at KUSA from 2009-12, will serve as field anchor as well as holding down the anchor desk with Anne Trujillo and, at times during the next two months, Landess.

In making the announcement, KMGH News Director Jeff Harris cited Kahnert’s record as a “hard news journalist” with investigative reporting instincts and a history of breaking big stories.

“7News is the kind of news organization I’ve always wanted to be part of. They don’t spend a lot of time on the fluff,” Kahnert said by phone.

Before joining ABC affiliate KSTP in Minneapolis, Kahnert was an anchor and investigative reporter at NBC affiliate KOB in Albuquerque. While at 9News in Denver, he won an Emmy for a two-part series, “Unemployment Fraudsters,” exposing problems within the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

Mike Landess, the silver-haired veteran of four decades as a TV anchor, will retire from KMGH in late August. Landess has spent more than 20 years in the Denver market, 16 of them as part of the most ratings-rich team in local TV news history, when paired with Ed Sardella at KUSA.

Among numerous awards, he received Emmys for his live coverage of the bombing at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park and, in Washington, D.C., for anchoring 16 hours of live coverage after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“We’ve been talking about it for a couple of years and hitting that 50-year mark seemed like an appropriate time to do it,” Landess said in a statement released by KMGH Thursday.

His first job was in radio in Tyler, Texas, as a high school senior. This year marks his 50th in broadcasting.
His first TV anchor job was in Cleveland.

In 1977 he was hired by Channel 9 (then KBTV) and began a 16-year co-anchor run with Sardella. The duo was unmatched, anchoring the highest-rated late newscast in the country, at times claiming a 51 share. (These days a 14 share wins at 10 p.m.) Their heyday was at a time when local TV news was not challenged by the internet or proliferating cable TV programming.

In 1993 Landess was transferred by Gannett to WXIA in Atlanta after a rocky chapter in his personal history; from there he jumped to WTTG in Washington, D.C. He returned to Denver in 2002 at 7News.

Denver’s 7News and reporter Keli Rabon won a duPont-Columbia Award for a year-long investigation into the failure of police to test thousands of rape kits gathered as evidence. “Colorado Rape Victims: Evidence Ignored, Justice Denied” uncovered systematic failures in the handling of rape cases in Colorado.

Two other stations are also winners of the Silver Baton: WFAA-TV Dallas and reporter Byron Harris will be honored for a relentless two-year long investigative series, “Dentacaid: Medicaid Dental Abuse in Texas,” and WVUE-TV New Orleans and reporter Lee Zurik for “Body of Evidence”, which revealed misuse of public funds, corruption and fraud. WBZ Boston won for breaking news coverage of the Boston marathon bombing. CBS News won for coverage of the Newton mass shootings. ESPN won for investigative reporting for the first time.

For KMGH, this marks the third duPont Award, broadcasting’s equivalent to the Pulitzer. The station won in 2003 for “Honor and Betrayal: Scandal at the Air Force Academy” and again in 2010 for “33 Minutes to 34 Right.” Rabon will be honored with Jason Foster, investigative photographer and editor; Art Kane, executive producer; Jeff Harris, news director; Byron Grandy, vice president and general manager.

Dismissive officials and uncooperative law enforcement agencies didn’t deter Rabon, who hopes the result of her work will be DNA matches to solve cold cases going forward. Read more…

A decline in the overall number of people using television is apparent in the Denver TV ratings in the just completed November sweeps (Oct. 31-Nov. 27). Increased use of digital and mobile technology are having an impact.

That said, there are highlights: 9News regained its across-the-board ratings dominance after losing the 4:30 a.m. hour to 7News last November. CBS4 showed gains in the morning and at 5 p.m. And Fox31 had a solid win over KTVD at 9 p.m.

Last year at this time, 9News enjoyed a late-news boost from NBC’s primetime, which had its first November win in nine years. This year, CBS4 benefited from the CBS primetime slate (“The Big Bang Theory” is the top comedy among Denver viewers, “NCIS” is the market’s No. 1 drama, both on CBS).

The old KLZ studios, an early “mobile unit” (ie. vintage car with an antenna attached), baby-faced Jim Redmond, Bertha Lynn and more are included. Fred & Fae, the reigning kidvid personalities of the ’60s, Bob Palmer, Carl Akers and other veterans of the station seem to be left out.

KLZ-TV Channel 7 went on the air as a CBS affiliate in 1953. It was the first Denver station to have a bureau in Washington, D.C., back when that was an economic possibility. It was the first Colorado station to get cameras inside a courtroom in 1955. Channel 7 carried one of the first global live satellite TV interviews, with President Dwight Eisenhower in the Channel 7 studio and Winston Churchill in England.

In the market’s 1995 affiliation swap, Channel 7 (then KMGH for owner McGraw-Hill) went from CBS to ABC. It remains an ABC affiliate, now owned by E.W. Scripps Company.

TV news is a go-to resource in the midst of disaster, but social media played an increasingly significant role during the Colorado floods of 2013, at times reaching out to the audience in ways that television can’t. Denver television stations saw tremendous upticks in the use of their various apps, social media and live streams. Twitter helped people make connections and locate loved ones. Push alerts on mobile phones, sent free to anyone who signed up, offered life-saving information about flooding and evacuations to anyone who signs up — without interrupting programming.

The technology of disaster coverage has evolved quickly.
Fox31 news boss Ed Kosowski said the use of social media now, even compared to how it was used in the wildfires a year ago, has exploded. “This is the kind of story that lends itself to social media. People need assistance and need information quickly. (Social media) has also become an excellent source for tips and information that we ordinarily wouldn’t have access to.”

“In a wildfire, you get cellphone pictures of smoke that aren’t great. Here we get viewer pictures of neighbors rescuing people, dogs and cats. We did a story based on that,” said Thomas Hendrick, digital content manager for KDVR. The station topped 50,000 tweets on its account in recent days, including hundreds of photos of flooding.

A Twitter handle collected the 140-character postings of media outlets, first responders, experts and government officials in one place: https://twitter.com/bbdd333/lists/colorado-flood-2013.
Next, as Colorado’s TV and radio stations collaborate on a telethon set for Wednesday, Sept. 18, the agreed upon hashtag, #COfloodrelief, will be used to spread the word and raise funds.

The 7News StormShield app was said by some users to be a literal life-saver. With 3,000 downloads of the app, a severe weather warning geo-targeted to users’ points of interest, people all over the country were using StormShield during the flooding.
“People were alerted, awakened Wednesday night with an urgent flash-flood warning. We were on the air continuously, which people watched on the app when power was out,” said 7News’ managing web editor Kim Ngan Nguyen. “We’ve gotten great testimonials from people.” The website (thedenverchannel.com) saw 10 times the normal daily usage. Live video streaming on mobile and web devices was 800 times the normal. “People got information any way they could.”

The 9NEWS Colorado Flood Resource Center was created for 9NEWS.com and is available as a Facebook app and as a mobile site, http://on9news.tv/coflood. This center gathers information from many agencies, making available in one place maps, disaster assistance, and notes on how to help those in need. From Sept. 12–15, 9NEWS.com counted 36.8 million page views and 6.1 million mobile app page views. Additionally, 9News clocked 17.7 million Facebook impressions and 21.3 million Twitter impressions.

“We used Twitter, Facebook and Google+, along with one main hashtag, #COFlood, to provide emergency information and updates to our followers. RebelMouse and Tagboard, social aggregates, were used to collect social posts that used the hashtag #COFlood,” according to 9News digital content manager Misty Montano.

KDVR cited a 600 percent increase (roughly 3,000) in new “likes” on FB, Wednesday through Monday, as staffers talked to people, gave street coordinates and updated the location of the TV stations’ shared helicopter, Hendrick said. Unlike TV news, the reach of social media is quantifiable: One post about the evacuation notice in Commerce City was shared almost 5,000 times and had a reach of 454,656 people, he said.

“It truly is a two-way communication. And more intimate communication,” Kosowski said. The Fox31 total is now more than 100,000 FB fans making it third behind KUSA and KMGH. ((CORRECTION: Fox31 is second behind KUSA. The numbers: 9NEWS 134,226; FOX31 Denver 107,042; 7NEWS 105,829; CSB4 22,461.))

The wide use of social media locally shouldn’t come as a surprise. Denver ranks in the top 10 social media-savvy cities, ahead of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and other cities, according to NetProspex, a B2B data company.

The devastating Colorado flooding of 2013 lent itself to poetic descriptions as local media outlets worked around the clock to bring information, stunning video and colorful metaphors to consumers. Some of the poetry played fast and loose with facts — even the National Weather Service described the rains as being “of Biblical proportions” (who knew their record-keeping went so far back?). Some viewers found that, while the raging, ravaging, torrential pictures painted by anchors were amazing, sometimes the information was read too quickly to note the boundaries of neighborhoods affected, minus map graphics. The sound of rushing water minus words was sometimes the most astounding.

In times of crisis, it’s not easy to balance quick and clear, fact-based reporting with the more flowery descriptions inspired by dramatic events. Official word was: stay in, watch the news.

Notes on the media deluge:
KMGH and KUSA stayed with the story longest, delivering new information well after KDVR gave up and went with “TMZ” and KCNC gave in to “The Young and the Restless.”

Longtime Colorado broadcasters gave the best geographic reference points of road closures and what we were seeing in helicopter shots. Greg Moss was helpful in that respect. Among the more poetic standouts: Will Ripley and Kyle Clark of 9News. Steadfast in the field: Tyler Lopez and Lance Hernandez of 7News.

Speaking of helicopter shots, “Airtracker 7″ and “Sky9″ are the same bird, part of the ongoing sharing arrangement, a cost-saving measure by the two stations. The need to keep airspace clear for search and rescue flights kept the chopper close to the Denver metro area, rather than conveying pictures of the hardest-hit areas.

At a press conference, Gov. Hickenlooper noted the prevalence of personal media getting in the way, warning folks with cellphones to knock off the picture-taking in deadly circumstances. “People have their media and want to get a better shot,” he said, shaking his head.

Meterologists worked overtime to give an idea of what was falling from the skies. “An inch or two an hour” of rain, Dave Fraser said. Where Kathy Sabine clocked it at “a year’s worth of precip in two days’ time.” Which sounds wetter?

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.